Review: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Title: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Publisher: Speak
Release Date: October 16th, 2008
Genres: Contemporary, Drama, Comedy
Medium: Ebook, Bought

As you all should know by now, John Green is one of my absolutely favorite authors. Therefor, anything he writes, I should love, right? No. This is not the case. I do love John's writing in this book, but the plot... Not so much.

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin has been dumped nineteen times. On a road trip with his overweight best friend miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy is hoping to figure out The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, and finally win him the girl. -From Amazon.com

The plot is quite uneventful, I hate to say. It starts out slow, and only slightly acclimates towards the last half of the novel. The plot is also very awkward, in the way that it really has no direction, almost like the idea of a 'plot' is mistaken, because it seems to be nonexistent. It has no direction and very few qualities of interest and seems to all be very random, almost as if the events in the plot have no meaning or direct influence on the plot's outcome.

The characters are quite flat 2D and they change very little throughout the novel. This lack of character evolvement is unusual for a John Green novel, and quite disappointing. I found Colin to be slightly annoying and quite... Whiny. He cried all the time and was almost obsessive over his 18 ex girlfriends, almost stalker-ish. This got on my nerves frequently and made it had for me to read the novel at certain points. I'm guessing that's why it took so long for me to read this one, because if was so disinterested and bored.

Another thing in the writing that bothered me (and also bothered fellow readers) was the overuse of several words such as fug, fugging, kefir, jewfro, and more. I was also tired of anagrams and tangents and diagrams at the end of the novel. At points, the lengthy mathematical descriptions made me feel like I was reading an algebra textbook. And Colin's character overall tended to make me want to stop reading.

Overall, this was a not so good novel that I had had high expectations for, but ended up really disappointed. The plot just wasn't there, and though the writing was good (excluding the overuse of certain words like said above ex: fugging) it just didn't connect for me. I personally think that this is the less favorable of John Green's novels that I have read so far, The Fault In Our Stars being the best, Looking For Alaska being second, and this one, last. This novel was just not where it should be.